Month: September 2019

Recently I received the following email from a young Christian man which ended in a challenge from him to me.

“Dear BGR, I am a 17-year-old male who will be graduating high school in this next year. I have attended a Bible preaching Baptist church for all of my life. I was taught both at my church and in the public schools I have attended that women being given equal rights with men was and still continues to be a good thing for society. My parents are conservatives and I have considered myself a conservative for a long as I can remember. Like many conservatives, I believed that equal rights for women was good thing. But this is no longer the case for me.

Because of your blog I have had my “cultural blinders” as you call them removed.

I did not make the connection between the rise of feminism in the mid-1800s and the rampant sexual immorality, divorce, abortion and problems with LGBTQ that we face today until I read your blog. I cannot believe how blind I was and how blind the adults around me still are to this connection.

I love how deep you dive into the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures and how you base everything you believe on the Bible, the whole Bible and not just the parts people like. I also love how you dissect and tear apart liberal, socialist and secularist arguments against the Bible. With that said I have a favor to ask you or maybe more of a challenge for you.

Can you write a simple list, like a step by step list, of how young Christian men like me who have had our eyes opened to the evils that feminism has brought on our society can navigate this Post-Feminist world and live in a way that honors God and his design of gender roles? And here will be the hardest part for you – can you do it in 1000 words or less? I just know that a lot people my age don’t have the attention span that I do and I think if you made it short, they might just listen.

Jonathan”

Jonathan – challenge excepted.

Step 1 – Know Your Purpose in Life

God created you to be “the image and glory of God” and he created woman to be “the glory of man” (I Corinthians 11:7). This means you were created as a man to display or live out God’s attributes in your life’s work outside the home and as a husband and father in your home.

Companionship, sex and having children are all benefits of marriage and commanded by God in marriage but they are not the reason for marriage.

Ephesians 5:23-24 tell us “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church” and “as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing”. It also tells us in Ephesians 5:25 that husbands are to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church”. It is “for this cause” (Ephesians 5:31), the cause of picturing the relationship between God and his people, that we are to seek and enter into marriage.

Step 2 – Read Your Bible from Genesis to Revelation

Step 3 – Keep Sexual Relations for Marriage

The only sexual relations that God calls “honorable” (Hebrews 13:4) is that which occurs within marriage between a man and woman. When you have sex with a woman before entering into a covenant of marriage with her you pervert God’s design for man, woman, marriage and sex.

Step 4 – Build Your Career First, Then Seek A Wife

In Proverbs 24:27 we read “Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field; and afterwards build thine house”. Build your career first, then get build a home and family. In Ephesians 5:29 we read that husbands have a responsibility to nourish or provide for the physical needs of their wives “even as the Lord the church”. A man’s ability to provide for his future wife and children is a critical aspect of him picturing the relationship of God to his people in marriage. No man should ever even begin to seek marriage until he is fully prepared to be a provider for his future wife and children.

Step 5 – Look for A Woman Who Knows Her Purpose

Just as you must know your purpose in God’s creation as a man, so too you should seek out a woman who fully embraces her purpose in God’s creation as well.

“4 That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.”

Titus 2:4-5 (KJV)

The women you seek should fully embrace the teaching found in the passage above. No part of it should be uncomfortable for them.

Step 6 – Avoid Sexual Temptation While Waiting on Marriage

Some men may be able to provide for a family and therefore can marry in their late teens or early twenties because they enter a lucrative skilled trade or family business. Others may have to wait till their late twenties or early thirties after they finish college and then spend several years in their career before making enough to be the provider God has called them to be. A good example of those who would have to wait much longer are doctors and lawyers as it takes them almost a full decade to be firmly established in their careers.

So how does God want you to handle your unmet, yet God given sexual desires during this waiting phase of your life? The answer is one word and it is an uncomfortable word for some while others have been taught it is a sin. And that word is masturbation.

The scriptures condemn lust, not masturbation. And then we must understand how the Bible defines lust verses how we define it today. Romans 7:7 teaches us that lust is not mere sexual arousal or sexual fantasy, but it is in fact covetousness as defined in the 10th commandment. It is not a sin for you as a young man to be sexually aroused by or even have sexual fantasies about women. It is not even a sin for you to masturbate to such thoughts or images.

Lust, in the Biblical sense, is when you think about or desire to entice a woman into having sex with you outside of marriage. So, you don’t have to suppress your sexual nature until you are married, but rather you must exercise it within the bounds of God’s law. And a big part of avoiding sexual temptation before marriage is to set a boundary for yourself that you will never be alone with a woman that is not your wife or your blood relative.

Step 7 – Be Diligent in Your Search for A Wife

Jesus said in Matthew 7:7 “seek, and ye shall find”. You cannot hope to find a wife by simply sitting around and waiting for one to fall from the sky. 40 percent of couples who married in 2017 met online. Use all resources at your disposal and do not limit your search to only your local area, but look nationally and globally. And yes, if you look outside your local area it will require a lot more money for travel. So, start saving. Concentrate your efforts on rural areas as urban areas are often filled with women who don’t follow God’s purpose for their lives.

Step 8 – Do not Date but Instead Court

Dating leads to relationships based on emotion rather than compatibility. The Courtship process helps protect a couple from the temptation to have premarital sex while at the same time allowing parents the ability to offer an objective analysis of the compatibility of the couple.